General News

Associate Professor Claudia Scarlata won the College of Science and Engineering George W. Taylor Distinguished Research Award. The award comes with $3,000 to be used in Scarlata's research in astrophysics. The Distinguished Research Award recognizes younger faculty members who have shown outstanding ability in research.

Scarlata plans to use the money to support an undergraduate student during the summer. Scarlata's current research is related to the problem of how the radiation that is able to ionize hydrogen can escape from galaxies and reach the intergalactic medium. This radiation has wavelength shorter than 0.0912 micron (or energy larger than 13.6eV) and is in the far-ultaviolet for galaxies in the local Universe. The student will work with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, because this radiation can only be observed from space for nearby galaxies.